PS4: How Sony is Setting its Sights on World Domination

Sitting bleary-eyed in a conference room in Manhattan last week with a thousand or so other people – many of them equally jetlagged, I presume – I can’t have been the only person to wonder why we were in New York and not in Tokyo to hear about Sony’s new console. Sony has had some hard times recently, but it is one of the great Japanese companies, and for a long time the PlayStation brand was inextricable from the country that it came from.

Not so anymore, though. The Japanese presence at the PlayStation 4 event was pretty minimal, with studios from all over the world turning up to show off their new projects – with a strong US focus. The PlayStation 3 may have just edged past the Xbox 360 in terms of global shipped consoles, but it’s still firmly in third place in the USA and the UK despite big success in Japan and the rest of Europe. Sony will want to change that, and it is displaying a more global attitude than ever before, right down to the design of the console itself. It’s a mission statement: the company is making a serious play for global dominance.

“I think we’re looking to improve our competitive position everywhere,” Sony Computer Entertainment Europe’s CEO Jim Ryan told IGN in an interview just after the conference. “Yes we have a strong position in certain European markets, but am I happy with where we are in the UK with PS3 relative to competition? No I’m not. We want to improve our competitive situation everywhere in the world, and that’s a normal business position to take. We’re going to do our best to do that.” But how?

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We’re looking to improve our competitive position everywhere.

It’s no secret that PlayStation consoles have traditionally been complicated to develop for, largely because they have always run on lovingly-developed proprietary technology like the PlayStation 3’s CELL chip, researched and created in isolation by Sony in Japan. The PlayStation 4, meanwhile, has been designed in collaboration with developers – including Western developers like Evolution and Guerrilla, both of whom spoke out in a developer roundtable after last week’s conference.

“It’s the first time we’ve ever done this within PlayStation – get the whole group of core developers together and consistently give very deep profound feedback on everything system related,” said Guerrilla Game’s Herman Hulst, currently hard at work on Killzone. “It’s no longer built in isolation in an ivory tower somewhere in Tokyo, it’s shared with us, and together we really built the machine.”

“Because of weekly calls working on the design, receiving iterative prototypes of the model, constantly providing feedback, it really does a fantastic job,” added Evolution’s Matt Southern, he of the mild leather-car-seat obsession, talking about how the console meets the needs of a next-generation racing game like Drive Club. The engineers and designers from every Sony studio were involved in the design of the console itself – demonstrating a friendliness to developers that Sony has never demonstrated before.

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Sony will be hoping to inspire confidence in the third-party publishers that wil make the PS4 truly global.

Sony will be hoping that the assurance of these first-party developers might inspire confidence in the third-party developers and publishers that will make the PlayStation 4 truly globally relevant. “Since we’ve worked on it so long and given feedback so long, that’s the reason we’re confident today as a group of developers,” emphasises Hulst. “We know the path that it’s taken, and we know that once it’s in the hands of people that love gaming, it’ll work well.”

This is also a large part of the reason why the conference took place in New York and not in Tokyo – says Jim Ryan. “I think there’s recognition that at an event like this, there are many audiences that are being spoken to. There’s obviously the gaming community, but equally for something like this whether you like it or not you’re talking to the investment community, shareholders, potential investors of all sorts, and increasingly the world is a more global place, and Tokyo ain’t always the best place for those sorts of conversations to take place.

“I think also it’s a statement about the importance of the US market to us. It’s just a great city to do this sort of thing in actually – it seemed to work, it seemed to sit very well with the whole vibe of the event, rather than going off to one of those big ballrooms in a hotel in downtown Tokyo where the whole thing’s a bit soulless. I think it worked well doing it here. I’m pleased we did it here.”

So what part does Japan play in this new PlayStation landscape? The original PlayStation and the PlayStation 2 were consoles defined by Japan and Japanese talent: Gran Turismo, PaRappa the Rapper, Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, Katamari Damacy, Silent Hill and Resident Evil. We saw some Japanese presence at the reveal, but the influence was certainly less prominent.

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The Japanese development and publishing community seemed to find this current generation rather a challenge.

Jim Ryan took care to point out the success of Gran Turismo 5 on the PlayStation 3, but he acknowledged the challenges that Japan has faced with the current-generation consoles. “I think if you stand back and look generally the Japanese development and publishing community seemed to find this current generation – and I’m not just talking about our own studios when I make this comment – they seemed to find the current generation rather a challenge in terms of genuine innovation to an extent that Western developers perhaps did not,” he said. But Japan is Sony’s heartland, and Japan will always be more than a market for the company. “We were particularly keen to have good Japanese representation last night,” he said.

Sony will never leave Japan behind, but the PlayStation 4 reveal suggests to me that the company is going for America more aggressively than ever before. By getting out ahead of Microsoft’s next-generation console reveal and holding its event on the American giant’s own turf, Sony was making the statement that it wants to be number one everywhere – and it will not allow Microsoft the head-start that it enjoyed with the Xbox 360.

Given the rapid rate of change in the games industry, this might be the last-ever round of the console war, at least as we know it. The PlayStation 3 might have been ahead in Europe and Japan, but there’s more to be achieved this time around. In designing and pitching the PlayStation 4 as a truly global prospect, Sony is showing a keen awareness of the stakes.

Keza MacDonald is in charge of IGN's games coverage in the UK. You can follow her on IGN and Twitter.